One of the major questions in the study of sex roles concerns explanations for the consistently evidenced higher rates of psychological disorders among women. Explanations for differences have used three different and competing conceptualizations - (1) a cultural facilitation of illness behavior, (2) a structural facilitation of illness behavior, and (3) social causation of illness. Research findings are equivocal; many studies have not included measures which would enable simultaneous testing of these competing conceptualizations. This proposal requests support for secondary analyses of a data set that provides an excellent opportunity to test these frameworks. The analyses will document variation in mental health and experienced stresses within and across different sex roles of women. Comparisons to similar male sex roles will also be made. The main analysis will test the fit of the observed data to the patterns that would be expected under each of the three frameworks. The research also entails analysis of parallel data on persons married to each other. These analyses will provide a significant increase in our understanding of the epidemiology of sex roles differences in mental health. Specific attention will be given to the etiologic role of life stress and to the problem of differentiating processes of illness causation from those of illness attribution.